Resumen: What is the role of presidents in the politics of redistribution in developing democracies? Do
other political actors, such as legislators and governors, influence redistribution? Is redistribution
shaped by political (that is, partisan) factors or do programmatic criteria play also a part?
Redistribution in very unequal developing countries is a divisive issue. Most researchers
recognize a crucial role of the state in redistributive politics. Despite this, there is little we know
about the factors that shape government redistribution. This paper studies political and economic
factors that affect the allocation of interregional redistributive transfers in Argentina and Brazil,
two highly unequal countries in Latin America (the world’s most unequal region). The focus is
on funds with high redistributive impact and over which the central government may have large
discretion: public infrastructure. Using original data on federal infrastructure spending for the 24
provinces in Argentina and the 27 states in Brazil (for the period 1999-2011), this paper shows
that redistributive politics (in particular, the distribution of infrastructure funds) in developing
federations is fundamentally determined by executive politics. The main claim is that presidents
use redistributive transfers as a tool to build up sizeable and secure political support. We also
found large variation in the relevance of Congress and programmatic criteria across cases, and
that legislative overrepresentation is not always a relevant factor to explain redistribution,
contrary to findings in the literature on the US and the European Union. We discuss some
possible reasons for these results and the implications of these results for the broader
comparative debate